Surgeons and clinicians have expressed concern that statistics collected may not be accurate and may be interpreted wrongly. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Last Thursday, the health minister, Ben Bradshaw, announced that the NHS choices website would eventually let patients compare the performance of individual surgeons and GP's.This signifies a huge shift of power towards the patient - but it has left clinicians questioning if this knowledge would be in the patients' best interest, writes operating department practitioner Tom Osborne.

Comparing surgeons that do the same operations is not a simple as it may appear. When presented with a high risk patient, one surgeon may operate when another will not.

The one that operates may well save the patient, adding years to their life, while the one that did not will never know. Individual statistics could mean that the risk-takers are marked with a blot against them.

One experienced consultant anaesthetist working in Brighton, who has insight into surgery and can remain objective amidst this news, told me: "We would be penalising those surgeons who save the life of the sickest patient.

"In the public interest, these are the surgeons we need operating on us - one that is prepared to back himself in any circumstance."

Having statistics published could result in an over-cautious approach to decision making, as well as statistical competitiveness.

A consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at the Royal Sussex County Hospital told me: "At the moment, if there is a five percent chance that someone will survive the operation and they and the family agree, we will do it.

"But some surgeons may say no because of their statistics. It would hurt them to if they fell behind their peers whilst trying to do the best thing. We need to make sure that statistical competitiveness is not to the detriment of patient care."

This is not confined to a single speciality. An orthopaedic surgeon from the same hospital said: "We have one consultant who deals with almost all revision hip replacements. Of course his infection rates will be higher than others, but does that make him a less careful surgeon? By no means."

The government has already announced that it is going to publish death rates of patients undergoing major surgery in the UK's NHS hospitals in September. Operations include hip and knee replacements and serious abdominal procedures.

But now consultants question whether medical care can be accurately represented by the way data is collected and collated. One vascular consultant said: "Statistics are important only if they are accurate. Consultants want statistics and are not scared of publishing them but they are often misleading.

"People will then be reacting to figures that simply are not fact. The public will be given numbers to work with and will have no idea of the context in which they were taken."